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too much of the same anchor text the same as your page title?

I was wondering if too much of the same inbound link anchor text the same as your page title was looked at more forgivingly by Google being as the title of your page is what your page is about and is bound to have tons of inbound links with anchor text with your page title in it. For example, links pointing to hammers.com/ball-peen-hammer.html would obviously have ball peen hammer in the anchor text naturally more than any other anchor text pointing to that page merely because that is what the page is about. So can you have 95% of your links saying ball peen hammers without google thinking that it looks suspicious if it's your page title?

2 Responses

I agree with Takeshi. The links..."natural" links are never consistent. They are all different types.

People may link to you as:

Blue Widgets

I bought blue widgets here

buy widgets

Your Brand Name

Misspells

and so on. Where the bold is what is hyperlinked/anchor. Also, keep in mind, that Search Engines have a lot more data to decide whether the links are natural / artificial. EG, profile of the linking sites, how frequently do they link out, do they link primarily to smaller sites...etc and so on. The kinds of links your linking sites have to themselves and so on.

There are no exact percentages when it comes to the right amount of inbound anchor text links, but many experts are recommending around 60% exact anchor text match as "natural" enough not to trip any Penguin filters.

The truth is that most sites will not have 95% of links using the same anchor text, unless the keyword happens to be your brand name, but even then 95% seems high. Most sites have a diverse mixture of anchor text including things like brand name, "click here", the URL, etc.

Of course, you can avoid the issue of having to worry about unnatural anchor text by going for links that actually *are* natural, where you have no control over the anchor text. Those types of links tend to be higher value anyway. But if you're going for manual links, use your common sense and don't be spammy about it. If an SEO can take a look at your links and think they're suspicious, chances are so will Google's algorithms.

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